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Chatbots are some of the phenomenal breakthroughs in the world of artificial intelligence (AI). These AI-enabled conversational agents are designed to hold auditory or textual dialogues with humans. Chatbots appear intelligent, but they still have a long way to go in terms of perfectly replicating human-like conversations. Even so, chatbots have remarkable adaptive, learning, and predictive capabilities.

"When I was about 8 years old I became overly obsessed with the idea of moving objects with my mind — just think of a mini Darth Vader version of myself. But, truth be told, no matter how hard I tried, or how long I stared, nothing would really move." Today, we might not be moving objects with our minds or be able to time travel (yet) but, we can do a lot more than what we’d expect merely 20 years ago. We can ask Alexa to play our favourite guilty pleasure on Spotify, have a robot open a door, and even send a car into space.

Algomus is a rapidly growing Detroit area startup that has built Algo the world's first Analyst Workbot and Enterprise ML powered Big Data Analytics platform for media & entertainment companies, manufacturers, distributors and retailers. Algomus, who are partnering with RE•WORK for the AI Assistant Summit in San Francisco this January 25 - 26 have just launched Algo 2.0, making their AI enabled workbot even smarter.

Researchers estimate that by 2020 we will speak to chatbots more than we speak to our spouses. Obviously, companies that implement chatbots are doing something right. But while there are plenty of effective chatbots on the market, there are also many that don’t quite meet consumers’ needs. So how do you measure the success of your chatbot?

There is little dispute that AI is progressing more rapidly than ever and is transforming every industry it touches. Paranoia is rife as rumours and speculations spread - we hear about AI stealing jobs, robots taking over the world, but as Andrew Ng recently said, ‘worrying about killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars—we'll have plenty of time to figure it out.’ At the Deep Learning Summit in Montreal last month Yoshua Bengio continued this thought and explained that 'contrary to what people think, scientific progress is slow and continuous, but social and economic impact can be disruptive - there’s no doubt that we will reach human level AI but we don’t know how long it’s going to take. We need to make sure that AI and society will bloom for the benefit of all.'

Wouldn’t it be great to have a personal assistant to help you with all your insurance needs. SPIXII is exactly this - the chatbot that wants to make your customer service experience easier, more efficient, and more human. The word ‘insurance’ is enough to put most people off, evoking painful memories of long forms, waiting on hold listening to terrible lift music, and eventually being oversold on a policy you don’t really need.
SPIXII’s goal is to ‘build a bridge between customers and insurers’ through the implementation of an AI powered chatbot.

“Do I need to take a coat today?”, “Play my workout playlist in the living room”, “Order me a takeaway.” Demands that your family might find pretty rude or tiresome, but perfectly acceptable to ask your voice and chat assistant. But we all know how frustrating these AI Assistants have previously been - you ask your phone to “Call Mom” and are answered with “Searching Google for Mom” - argh, no! We shouldn’t be to surprised, however, that the first generation of these assistants didn’t behave in the way we wanted them to. We were expecting our smartphones and household devices to understand our accents, colloquialisms, and emotions in the same way a human brain processes these types of information, when that is something that the machine simply cannot comprehend.

Next month, the increasingly popular Deep Learning Summit is returning to London along with the fourth global AI Assistants Summit. This two track event will bring together cross-industry experts in AI and deep learning to share their latest research advancements.
As the event has grown we have welcomed new attendees, speakers and sponsors each year as well as returning attendees who continue to benefit from the wealth of knowledge and expertise year on year.

Today, we see conversational AI all around us, from bots that we can chat with on messaging apps to voice assistants in our homes, cars and on our phones. As new hardware like in-home speakers become more prevalent, people are beginning to use these conversational agents for more and more tasks. We’ve moved beyond simple questions, like “What’s the weather going to be tomorrow” to expecting our agents to understand, remember and even make decisions to better serve us.